


standing on the stairs of water

by orphan_account



Category: Jongens | Boys (2014)
Genre: Heatwave, M/M, Marc doesn't know how anger works (less funny than you think), Sieg's family life is a sad ghost story, teenagers who think too much, the coach is crude comic relief, the problem of girls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-29
Updated: 2015-10-29
Packaged: 2018-04-28 19:57:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5103824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes a month for Marc to get on the moped and ride with Sieg.</p>
            </blockquote>





	standing on the stairs of water

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently my longest fic to date had to be written for a niche fandom.
> 
> W. S. Merwin, whose 'Separation' and 'Is That What You Are' (found in the end-notes, quoted in the title) I use was read by Dante and Ari from Benjamin Alire Saenz's novel. There are no other intentional references, but I definitely had it in mind when writing this fic.
> 
> Unbeta'd.

 

Your absence has gone through me 

Like thread through a needle.

Everything I do is stitched with its color.

 

W. S. Merwin, _Separation  
_

* * *

 

July is ending. The weather news say there’s going to be a heatwave. Sieg doesn’t really listen to the weather news. Mornings are silent things for him, half-covered in the shadows and filled with automatic actions: get up; go to the kitchen; eat. After a few hours of dreamless sleep he is capable of doing only so much. To turn the radio on he’d have to think more complexly and the point is not to. Sieg leaves home before his dad or Ed are up, still all nervous around him because of the other evening. It slowly becomes The Evening and The Sieg Problem; Sieg sees it. He has joined the wide stream of thoughts his dad spends nights pouring into the fireplace with mom’s photo above it. If she were there, Sieg hears or imagines hearing, she’d knew what to do; she’d solve The Sieg Problem and The Ed Problem; if she were there they would never sprawl so large and monstrous. Since Sieg’s mom definitely isn’t there, his dad eventually stands up. Sieg can’t stop being afraid that one day he won’t. He’ll leave the problems behind and choose the photo. See, this is why Sieg prefers not to dwell on things so much. So he has structured his day without pauses dwelling would fill. It’s all tracks: running and push-ups and more running, just until Sieg is certain there’s no possibility of dwelling afterwards.

An advantage of arriving early to the track is an empty locker-room. He has grown enough not to be ashamed of his body: there’s just enough muscles and bones; it’s clean and efficient; Sieg likes it alright. The problem isn’t people looking at Sieg. The problem is Sieg looking at people. It’s something he caught himself doing not so long ago but ever since then, he can’t seem to stop. Whatever it is, sport magazines or strangers on the road, Sieg’s eyes turned mad and began collecting images of male bodies. It’s enough admitting it to make Sieg blush. Sieg’s mind is a garbage dump and Sieg’s body is a spy for the other side. Alright, maybe he’s a bit ashamed. Only, he can’t get how all those people go around him and don’t figure it out. He supposes they already have and are waiting to bring it up: _have you seen Sieg? It’s clear the boy’s gone –_ he needs to stop dwelling.

He walks out of the locker-room. The warming up is difficult; he’s too used to it to be able to focus on the exercises. His mind feels like wandering off again, so he studies his surroundings. Lately, it has become boring. It’s the weather. All blinding sunlight; it makes world sharp-edged and vividly coloured; no room to guess. It must be what Eddy’s video games look like inside. If somebody would still want a secret out of Sieg, he could take this: sometimes, Sieg feels exactly like a video game character; reading out of the script. Nobody asks about his secrets now, though. Sieg would be too embarrassed to speak it out loud, anyway. There’s no fourth wall breaking in the video games like Ed’s. He isn’t sure where he got the term. One lesson he was unlucky enough to spend close to the teacher, it seems.

When Sieg gets to the tracks, it’s all over. Sunlit white lines make his eyes water and hurt a little bit, but it’s fine. There’s a rhythm to focus on and his body gets pained just enough to keep his mind shut. Others start to come, but at this point Sieg is already too tired to make out voices and words. He stops only when Stef appears on his left, laughing and saying something like:

‘One day, they’ll find you sleeping here.’

Sieg stops to engage in the nudging competition which he knows will soon be over. Stef knows about running and doesn’t need telling what too long breaks do to your legs. Still, he doesn’t push himself so hard as Sieg does. The coach said they can’t rest on laurels and Sieg takes it seriously. He doesn’t intend to. Not only resting on laurels sounds too much like conditions under which dwelling could occur; Sieg simply doesn’t want to lose his form. Recently it hit him that running is about the only thing he’s good at. He really wants to keep being good at it.

Sometime around the noon they take a break. Sieg, pulled by Stef by the tissue of his t-shirt, lands outside of the tracks and they look for a shadow which would cover them whole. Each day, it becomes more of a struggle. Sometime, Tom joins them. The relay race team, as they came to be known, has formally fallen apart, but they still hang out. Tom swears it’s because they’re such babies they make him feel actually smart. Right now, he is making a face they all are laughing at.

‘Get me some ice cream,’ he whines. ‘A pool of it.’

‘I’m not wasting my product on you,’ Marc replies.

Sieg tries not to dwell. His attempts amount to intense glaring at his sneakers. Marc makes sure to stand as far from Sieg as possible while preserving the illusion of them standing within one group. Nobody has mentioned it. Except Stef, who on the first day after the race got as far as saying _Hey guys you had a really good_ and then he saw the looks on Sieg’s and Marc’s faces, pale from the second sleepless night in a row, and dropped it. It remains dropped.

They joke with each other and laugh half-heartedly after each punch-line, uninspired due to the overwhelming heat. Sieg is burning when the coach finally yells at them to come back to running, _goddamit_. He is quite sure they will fall apart and it is somehow his fault. Wasn’t it him the coach told not to spoil it for the others? Well, Sieg did. He doesn’t dwell on it. What he does is to run and run until his body fails him and it doesn’t do so quickly. Somehow, he has missed the moment when the others left. Stef too, going out with Kim whom he is dating now, all well and proper. Sieg’s relationship with Jessica has been reduced to a growing number of unanswered calls from her. It isn’t that Sieg wants her to take a clue – as Stef would call it if Stef knew how much of a laugh is Sieg’s love life – Sieg simply wouldn’t know what to say to her. So the number grows and is another thing Sieg doesn’t dwell on.

It’s easier after the training. If he really does all he can – and usually, there’s nothing he wants more – he spends the remaining hours of the day in a strange and pleasant state of complete disconnection from the reality. Next day, he remembers perfect nothing of it.

*

Here’s what went down after The Evening:

Sieg was riding on a not-quite-stolen moped and he was very much dwelling. The neighbourhood didn’t distract him, empty streets and lines of repeating pastel-coloured houses, all with shortly cut grass and pointed chimneys. It seemed a neat and clean paradise; a fitting place for Marc with his sweet little sister and casually graceful mother and definitely unintimidating father. Back then, Sieg didn’t feel strange with the melting adoration for a strange family. To him it was the only natural reaction to Marc and people who raised him. Later, he decided it was a result of an adrenaline rush. Truth was, he had never run away before. This first time, like all first times, left him mad with hope.

It didn’t make him nervous to realize he was lost. Soon enough he saw a familiar tree and there was a turn looking more crooked than the others and a street-name with a known ring to it. Sieg took the turn and saw the ice cream parlor, shut and empty. He got off the moped and felt the speed wearing off. It took him ages to cross the yard and knock on the door, and then it took all of his gut not to run away at the sight of Marc’s mother with foam on her hands and surprise written over her face, saying:

‘Oh, Sieg?’

It was so genuine Sieg instantly regretted coming there. Not his place, he told himself, not then and not ever. Marc’s mother led him through a moonlit room, where all chairs were on the tables, casting odd shadows, to a bright kitchen where Marc’s father stood with a plate and a towel. He raised his eyebrows and Marc’s mother nodded. There were all sorts of things burning in Sieg’s body: he didn’t deserve the nod and this kind of acceptance; it was such a domestic scene it made Sieg’s throat tight; Neetlje was asleep on the couch and she was wearing a ridiculous and worn-out bee costume which looked like something seven years old Marc would wear, and Sieg thought he was going to suffocate.

‘Are you alright?’ Marc’s mother asked, handing him a bowl he accepted without looking at it. He nodded vigorously. Two hours ago, he thought he was something of a courageous person. He wasn’t one. ‘Well, here’s mango sherbet,’ Marc’s mother pointed at the bowl. ‘And Marc is at the trampoline. Will you find your way?’ Sieg nodded again and left through the large glass doors. He avoided noticing his own reflection in it. A sight of a suffocating person can’t be too nice.

It was a dark July night, with noises and shadows. Trees were croaking and birds were screaming. Sieg wasn’t sure how he made it to the trampoline. What took him the most time was figuring out what to do with the bowl. Leaving it in the grass seemed disrespectful and he was sure he would spill some if he were to eat it on the trampoline. He settled on sitting on the edge and eating in a manner leaving only his own clothes in risk of getting dirty.

‘Hi’ he said squinting his eyes to make out where Marc was lying. ‘Your mom gave me,’ he raised the bowl and realized Marc couldn’t see it. ‘Some sherbet.’ He still was half-expecting to hear: _yeah, she’s crazy like that, going to ruin the business, you know?_. What Marc said instead was:

‘Leave.’

Sieg felt contradicting sensations riding his body: his chest was burning and his tongue was numb with all the ice. His heart seemed desiring to burst through his skin and break some ribs on the way. It must had been what people with heart attacks felt like.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said steadily. He felt like choking.

‘I heard.’

There was a pause. Blood was pounding in Sieg’s ears. He felt the sherbet melting on his teeth and his gums hurting. The bowl was slipping out of his sweating fingers. Without noticing it, he started drumming a spoon against the bowl. It made a rhythm Sieg could focus on. _One, two, three._ Numbers, he thought, around which he could build sentences, however rickety they were. He needed sentences to escape the feeling of reliving the last minutes before the race: Marc waiting for Sieg’s to say something and fix the damage he had made and Sieg going mute. _One, two, three._

‘I didn’t know what to do, then,’ Sieg said a word after word, _one, two, three,_ feeling them falling out of his mouth like some alien bodies. ‘I wish I hadn’t done what I did.’

‘Me too.’

Sieg desperately looked for words which he could use to explain about Eddy and about Dad; but he couldn’t make any sense of those he knew. All of his body was burning and all sentences were derailed before he began them.

‘Are you,’ _onetwothree,_ he said at last. ‘mad?’ _onetwothree._ His voice didn’t shake. He wondered if Marc was able to hear the furious beat of his heart.

‘So mad I’m sick of it.’

It was a shock to Sieg that his heart didn’t stop. He was sure there was no air in his lungs. If his body had fallen on the ground, the sherbet would be wasted. What a shame, he’d better eat it quickly. How was he to fix it? Marc was mad. Marc who rode into the rivers was sitting up there, all alone, mad. Sieg was swallowing the sherbet very quickly.

‘Can we,’ _onetwothree_ he must had been choking now, ‘be’, _onetwothree_ , ‘again,’ _onetwthr_ , _‘_ can we?’. _Ontwthr, ntwthr, twth._

‘I need time.’

‘OK,’ _onetwothree,_ Sieg breathed out. ‘OK. I’m going to,’ _one, two, three,_ he didn’t know. ‘I’m leaving now.’

‘I’ll take the bowl,’ Marc spoke again before Sieg had the time to jump down. ‘You don’t have to go all the way through the house. There’s a path around it. Go there, yeah?’

‘Yeah.’ _One, two, three_.

Sieg hanged for a moment longer; half-consciously waiting for an another afterthought. None came. Unable to say one word more he left the trampoline behind and straggled through the garden cloaked with thick darkness. There was a path around the house and he took it, and he started the moped and rode fast. He knew it was all about keeping Sieg out of Marc’s house and Marc’s parents, and their undeserved warmth. He hardly saw the road. It shivered before him like an image from a broken kaleidoscope.

*

There are four clients sitting in the parlor. A couple under an umbrella feeding each other their sundaes with ice cream all over their faces now and an elderly man wearing sandals with his socks who has ordered a dessert called _Unicorn Warrior_ (Neetlje’s idea of a name) with utmost dignity, and a woman without age who apparently deemed the parlor to be a perfect place for ordering an espresso only to shot disappointed looks from above her laptop. Marc grins widely when their eyes meet and returns to his project. It’s a tree-house for Neetlje he’s going to build with dad. Neetlje has been on about it since June. But it was only recently Marc found an appeal in a plan of constructing a bird-nest for his little sister. He was looking for something to do with himself and building it seemed just right. He also agreed to spend more time in the parlor. His parents have never forced him to work there and Marc himself rarely found himself interested. Now he comes behind the counter every day he’s not on the tracks. Truth is, sixteen or not, Marc adores those people. He feels his brows unfurrow on the mere sound of their voices.

‘ _Wild Summer Night_ , please’ says someone and Marc’s rises his eyes from the plan turned into elaborate shapeless doodles. A new client is a guy with sunglasses and an expensive, but worn-out camera hanging around his neck.

‘Have a seat, it’s going to take a while.’

‘I can wait’ the guy says and Marc chuckles. He likes friendly clients because he, an ice cream parlor worker extraordinaire, needs to be friendly to all sorts and it feels incomparably better to be honest about it. ‘It’s always this hot there?’ the guy asks.

‘No, we’re all surprised. We consider sending some complaint to the authorities, do you reckon it’d help?’ Marc flashes the guy a smile and the guy smiles back. Marc hands him the dessert. He notices a number scribbled on a napkin. The guy has a sparkle in his eyes when he leaves the counter. Marc contemplates it. His mom, appearing out of nowhere with an aura of lazy summer half-nap still floating around her, looks over his arm.

‘The sunglasses one?’ she asks.

‘Yeah’ Marc replies.

‘He’s cute’ his mom says. Tom once said it’s surreal to hear one’s parent speak like a teenager. Marc replied it’s surreal to hear a teenager speak like a Cookie Monster. Tom pretended to find the remark offensive.

‘He is,’ Marc agrees throwing the napkin into the dustbin. He doesn’t think about it too hard. These days he thinks of little else but a tree-house and serving sundaes to nice clients and talking with his mom and his dad and Neetlje. It makes him content and comfortable; like a good person he likes himself to be. The napkin reminds him too much of all things he’d like to not to be thinking of. Not thinking of things, technically, isn’t breaking the promise.  Obviously, he knows it is and he hates it.

‘You drinking any water?’ his mom asks settling herself on a bar-stool on the other side of the counter. Marc doesn’t lie. ‘I knew’ his mom sighs. ‘Take some from the fridge, alright?’

‘I will, mom’ Marc says. It’s a no joking matter with her. He can still remember – was it 2003? Sometime before Neetlje was born – the terrifyingly warm night his mom received a phone call from the hospital in Arcen informing her about a seizure Grandma Els had. It happens everywhere, they said, everything because of the heatwave. The Great European Heatwave. Marc was four or five and didn’t understand what it was. He imagined it to be an invisible killer-cloud looming over all of the Netherlands. It took an hour of explanation from his dad to calm him down. It took longer to calm down his mom.

‘What’s up with the stormy-face, anyway?’ she is looking at him. Marc tries to laugh about it.

‘I’m afraid I’m becoming a bitter person,’ he says.

‘Oh, dear. Why would you say so?’

This isn’t a serious conversation yet and Marc can easily back off. The problem is, doing so would only prove his point. It’s all little bit tangled in his head, just like the doodles on the paper. But he’s honest enough to admit that avoiding the question would be another step to becoming a person he doesn’t like being. Discontented and uncomfortable, and angry. Not good. So he answers:

‘I can’t stop being angry and I hate it.’

‘Oh, dear,’ his mom repeats but now her eyes and smile go all sad and warm. ‘Whatever has happened to you?’

Marc appraises the knot his thought tangled themselves into. It’s rather large.

‘It turned out I’m the type to hold a grudge’ he starts. ‘The bit twisted type who wants other people to be hurt,’ he glances at the espresso lady and thinks she would call her coffee a _farce_. It’s a word from novels which boys from little towns don’t usually use, not unlike _charade_. It intimidates them and can be used as a weapon if wielded with care. After all, it isn’t said to be laughed at. It wasn’t when Marc said it. ‘I used to be able to mellow out always and I can’t, now. It makes me a person I don’t like,’ he glances at the _Wild Summer Night_ guy. ‘So on the top of it, I’m angry about this, too.’

His mom plays with her necklace. It’s an old and ragged thing, but she’s too fond of it to throw it away. She never throws things away. Dad and she discuss it, sometimes. That’s right, Marc has parents who have discussions and hold each other when they’re done. Maybe that’s why, he guesses, he doesn’t know how to be angry. No immunity whatsoever. Crushed at first exposure.

‘You’re harsh, Marc’ his mom says at last. ‘On both of you.’

‘Yeah, I guess I am.’

‘People make stupid things and you learn to live being aware of it.’

‘What a very grown-up phrase’ Marc says because he and his mom share these kinds of jokes. She lets him because they also share an agreement not to use them as a substitute of real words. Jokes are bridges between the difficult parts. Here comes the second one. ‘It’s because I thought the world of him,’ Marc pauses. ‘I have no idea why,’ he adds after a moment. It’s true. He can’t figure it out: Sieg was only a boy feeling uncomfortable in his own body and caring about all wrong things. On another hand, Marc has never been big on figuring the world out. Spoils the charm, he says. ‘His cruelty took me by surprise.’

‘I see. Does it matter to you?’

Marc doesn’t answer at once because three middle-school girls choose the moment to come at the counter and order three cherry sherbets or that’s what Marc hears through their giggles. He wouldn’t mind them, really. He spends too much time with Neetlje to think of girls as of something other than fierce and brilliant creatures. It’s only the mood Marc’s in making him look at them with a feeling worryingly close to contempt.

‘I feel it should,’ he says when the girls are seated far away stretching their legs in hope of getting some tan. His mom is waiting. Marc goes on thinking. There were cruel boys he met. After all, he did learn to say _Of course you’re not a homo_ in a perfectly calm voice. Only none of them – and here comes the flood of memories. It isn’t just about kissing with crush of waves in their ears; it’s also Sieg doing somersaults with Neetlje. ‘No, it doesn’t, really.’

They get quiet and listen to the sounds of a July afternoon turning sleazily into a July evening. People and animals fall out of sleep. Those siesta hours are the worst for the business. No one bothers to go out even to eat a sundae. There’s going to be more clients soon.

‘I told him I needed some time,’ Marc says.

‘What a very grown-up decision’ his mom parodies him making them both snicker. ‘In the meanwhile,’ she turns serious, ‘Don’t blame yourself for being less kind than you usually are,’ she goes on rising from the stool. ‘Don’t blame him, either. Maybe it was I and dad who should have taught you about anger,’ she pauses. Her smile falters. ‘How silly, to think you wouldn’t need it. Parents forget all important things, don’t we?’

*

‘Come, watch the sunset.’

Sieg hears it all the way home. The sunset brings people out of their cool houses and has them gazing with half-opened mouths and lemonade or beer in hand. It’s an everyday local holiday. His dad is looking out of the window, too. He isn’t watching the sunset. As soon as Sieg opens the door, he is right next to him, worried and trying not to seem worried.

‘How was the training?’

‘Good.’

‘Good.’

That’s the usual. They both smile awkwardly and dad moves so Sieg can come in. There’s a glass of water waiting for him. He empties it under dad’s studying look. It’s a necessary examination of The Sieg Problem. Since Sieg took to wandering around the town, his father has been conducting regular searches for the traces of Eddy-ness in him: booze and smokes and whatever his older brother’s been up to. Dad is quite sure Eddy has been, if not an origin, then at least an inspiration for the change in Sieg. It makes Sieg go all tight in the chest to realize how afraid his dad is of Sieg turning into Eddy. But The Evening remains something Sieg lets himself to be proud of. It’s a sad kind of pride, because he’s aware the incident was just an incident: an unrepeatable spurt of courage; something he felt capable of doing only in that precise moment, when he was still hoping it would change something. It did, but not in the ways Sieg wanted it to. So now his dad is all scared and Marc is – not to be dwelt on.

Sieg puts the glass in the sink. He’s about to go when his dad stops solving the crosswords and says:

‘Sieger,’ just this. There’s a substantial difference between being called ‘Sieg’ and ‘Sieger’. Sieg wonders how do parents who called their children one-version names achieve the effect of the full name used. It works on him: he sits and waits for his dad to go on. He hopes it’ll make him see how un-Eddy Sieg is. Eddy would never. ‘Sieg’ his dad begins again, seeing Sieg is going to be manageable. ‘You haven’t been home a lot lately.’

‘I’m only riding around,’ Sieg says and shrugs. ‘Making the best of the weather,’ he supplies a nice script-answer. Dad seems relieved. Better to have a son who is a loner than one who makes trips to the jail every once in a while.

‘Hm,’ dad doesn’t let go. ‘But are you,’ he pauses. Sieg is shifting in his chair. It’s some awful luck they’re each other’s son and father, no one there to drag the words out. From what Sieg remembers – it’s not a lot – it was mom’s job, pulling them by their tongues. He doesn’t dwell on it. It’s not going to be him staring into the fireplace next to his dad. ‘Are you alright, Sieg?’

It surprises them both.

‘Yeah,’ Sieg tries.

‘You said you weren’t,’ his dad reminds him in an uncomfortable voice. Sieg suddenly is wishing very hard for Eddy to come home at once and raise hell. It’s not something he’s used to be wishing for. ‘Back then, you said you weren’t.’

‘Yeah,’ Sieg has no other idea for an answer. The unreal feeling the afternoon left on him is slowly fending off. It’s bad news, because it’s high on unreality that Sieg survives the hours at home. If dad grounds him too much in here, Sieg is going to be dwelling and unable to sleep all night. It’s very bad news.

‘So,’ his dad doesn’t seem to notice. ‘So.’

‘I’m not,’ Sieg doesn’t know what would make his dad calm. ‘I’m not bad. It’s just some things with the,’ he goes for a half-truth, ‘guys at the club. Small mess, that’s all.’

His dad is looking at him as if he were a particularly difficult question in a crossword. Sieg knows dad wants to believe him and sees he doesn’t. It isn’t clear to Sieg when he became another son not to be believed. All because of the Eddy business and for no real reason. Maybe this is the situation smart people call ironic. For Sieg it’s only uncomfortable. He wants to go to his room and stare out of the window until his mind is all blank again.

‘You care about this club, you care very much’ his dad says finally. Sieg, not quite certain what does it mean, nods. His dad nods back and coughs and returns to the crossword. ‘Take a shower, kid,’ he mutters and Sieg must restrain himself from running.

Through the pouring water he hears Eddy come home and then it’s all quiet. No fighting. They had a talk, dad and Ed, one night and Sieg wasn’t as asleep as they thought he was. Dad told Ed to be better example. It made Sieg chuckle into his pillow, but now it seems his brother has taken something of it to heart, at least temporarily. How strange, Sieg thinks resting his forehead against wet tiles, for Eddy to do this. What could have happened, he goes on dwelling all the way, if Marc stood in the front of the car driven by the Eddy trying to be something for Sieg. Somehow it doesn’t seem to be the solution. Marc has never cared for Eddy. It should have been Sieg – it is all on Sieg. He feels now like curling up on the bathroom floor and waiting till he evaporates with all the steam blowing around his body.

*

Sun is low when Marc leaves the track. He hasn’t planned on staying there for so long. Then, he rarely plans. It’s a minor miracle he’s finished the project for Neetlje, however impossible to construct the tree-house turned out to be. All for Marc’s unbeatable desire to make people he cares for happy: a tree-house you enter by a flower-made ladder and leave by a slide. Inside, there’s a cocoa fountain and a hospital for birds and butterflies and, strangely, bats. Neetlje had Marc sit down and listen to her heartfelt speech about bats people are afraid of and unkind to as a result. She said _they’re only poor little birdmouses_ and Marc had no other choice. After all, he could deal with a few bats.

It’s exactly these words he’s thinking, _he could deal with a few bats,_ when Sieg enters the locker-room. He looks like coming down with a fever and, at first, doesn’t notice Marc. It’s only when he collapses on the bench and looks up. He gulps loudly. Marc feels the corner of his mouth go up. Sieg in the locker-room is its own kind of sight. Empty space all around him makes him look somewhat fragile. It delights Marc, because he felt, on his own skin, the weight of Sieg’s muscled arms. He likes to imagine the sort of blush which would appear, were Sieg to hear about the impression he makes. All of it and bats rush through Marc’s head without any control on his part. They leave and anger resettles into its rightful place. It does have its own rightful place within Marc now and they get used to each other. The important thing is to differentiate between Marc and the anger. Imagining it to be an ugly hairy monkey helps.

Sieg isn’t looking at him anymore. Fair. He is playing with an empty bottle now. Unnecessary gestures are something Marc is prone to be stupidly affectionate about. It comes from his own cultivation of quirks bordering on recklessness. For him, it’s a relationship with the world, an intimate trust, Marc jumping into a river and river carrying Marc. Sieg doesn’t seem to treat the bottle the way Marc treats the river. It’s bare nerves and no excitement to it.

Scrutinizing absorption of a wonder which Sieg didn’t cease to be for Marc is one thing, the ugly monkey heavy on his ribs is another. It makes him broken-hearted all over again to think how it has twisted. He could look at Sieg for the rest of his life, but he can’t stop being angry with him. The first person he’s in love with is the first person he could hate. Here’s a knot for you.

‘You’re out of water,’ Marc says making his voice as flat as possible. It’s a way of keeping anger out of it and it’s a way to hurt Sieg. There’s no purpose in it and Marc think that’s another important difference, the difference between calculated meanness and rage he’s not equipped to deal with. It leaves him a margin for being a good person. It seems to be a very narrow margin when Sieg’s face falls.

‘Yeah,’ Sieg says in an equally flattened voice. It feeds the monkey. Marc tries to think himself out of it and make the anger somehow weaker, but it doesn’t work. For one, he’s bad at suppressing his feelings and then there’re many reasons he felt angry for in the first place. The monkey is an able juggler. It throws at him just the worst memories of Sieg: from the first time he left Marc, both of them soaking wet and red-mouthed; the almost-fight in the front of the car and Sieg’s face all twisted by an animal fear. Marc clenches his teeth and tells himself he doesn’t want to hate Sieg.

‘Do you want some of mine?’ he manages to say and take a bottle out of his bag. It’s one of the four bottles his mom gave him this morning. It’s good to remember her now. Marc goes over what she has said as he stretches his arm and waves the bottle lightly. ‘There, have it.’

Sieg gets up from the bench and carefully, not touching Marc’s fingers, takes the bottle.

‘Thanks,’ he murmurs and drinks. Marc takes a moment to watch him, all golden light and long shadows, with drops of water rolling down on his chin. Stuff for paintings, really. If Marc could tear the monkey off his back and let himself just watch. He can’t. It makes him furious, knowing he can’t shift to a more comfortable position and watch the boy he loves drink water. It feels like the most natural thing to do. There’s the monkey, though.

Marc refuses to become it. He’s more and he’s better.

‘No, take it,’ he says when Sieg hands the bottle back. ‘All yours now,’ he adds. He wants to mean it, but the words come out somewhat ironic. Sieg takes a step back and Marc sees his arm tense and sweat pearling on his temples.

‘I am –‘ Sieg’s voice breaks.

‘No, don’t mention it,’ Marc says. Seeing Sieg trying to appear even smaller does things to him, things ugly, hairy monkeys just won’t ever get. ‘Stay hydrated and shadowed, you know,’ Marc cites about every news anchor in the town. ‘Mom doesn’t let me forget,’ he says finally. The mention of Marc’s family does it for Sieg, his grasp on the bottle is more certain and he straightens. It’s genuine, Sieg seems to think, and Marc feels the monkey’s pinches weaken, because here’s Sieg understanding what Marc means with his family. We could ruin each other, the thought rushes through Marc’s mind, being as dependent on each other’s reactions as we already are. _I don’t want us to_.

‘Thanks,’ Sieg says returning to his bench. It’s the sight of him, once more, against the large and empty wall which fills Marc’s voice with warmth:

‘You said it already,’ he says. ‘I’ve got to go, my shift starts in two seconds, or something.’ Sieg is watching him, uncertain what has happened and what is coming next. Marc doesn’t feel superior or guilty because of it, since he isn’t the one with answers. He gives Sieg a short smile and goes for the door.

The answer reaches him at the doorstep:

 ‘See you!’

 *

Burning wind flows through the window and blows the blinds making geometrical shadows on the floor turn all over. Sieg has chosen a triangle-like shape and doesn’t take his eyes off it as he does another series of push-ups. It’s what his mornings on the track-less days look like, waking up not a minute later and exercising all the dwelling away, which means the days  are all the same. Only usually, he’s more focused at home. There’s little to be distracted with: a square of cuttingly blue sky behind the window; a murmur of a car belonging to someone who doesn’t know where to go in the high noon of today; an occasional buzz of Sieg’s mobile. He would have switched it off, but the thought of missing a call from Marc always stops him. So far, his only missed calls are from Jessica. There’s twenty and one of them now. Sieg leaves them be, uncertain what he is to do about it. It’s clear they’re over, or however people call it, and Jessica dials his number willing only to be sad or angry about it. It’s all Sieg makes people be. Nothing to call or be called for, just stating the obvious.

This high noon Sieg finds it more difficult to not dwell. His eyes hurt from following the dark patches moving swiftly thorough the blinding lit floor and he feels dizzy and hot. Something erupts in his wrists and he falls on the floor with a loud thump. He’s glad he’s alone in the home. It’s a good thought to have while grasping for breath and aching all over because of the fall. It takes him a moment to stretch his limbs and form himself into an odd star-fish. They haven’t called it so, the day they did those on the rocking wooden platform. Sieg closes his eyes and feels the sunlight pushing his eyelids down. The sunlit parts of his body burn. He is going to take just a moment before he goes on with the push-ups. He tries to massage the pain out of his wrists and he thinks of Marc from the other day. It was the first time they spoke to each other since The Evening and what followed. The bottle, unemptied, is standing on the windowsill and sunrays make the water in it go all bright and sparkling. It adds some interesting shadows to the floor. Marc was – Sieg feels his hand wander – strange, he decides. Always is, though. He was speaking to Sieg. There’s some mad hoping Sieg has to control with all his mind, other way it’ll be running all over him. Sieg gets up, still dizzy, and goes to the shower. It’s all naked and in foam he hears the knocking. The heat must have turned him into a mad-man at last, because he lets out a little disappointed sigh when it’s Stef outside.

‘Shower,’ Sieg explains the towel around his hips.

‘Do you want get some ice cream?’ Stef asks and adds all in giggles, ‘Once you’re done?’ It earns him an eye-roll from Sieg, but in a moment he’s letting himself in, all familiar with Sieg’s home. Showered and clothed, Sieg returns to the kitchen and sees Stef with a glass of orange juice and radio on.

‘What’s up?’ Sieg asks and sits on the other side of the table. It makes him feel good, seeing Stef fitting in the kitchen, it makes him believe it’s possible to be genuinely happy in the place. There’s no real ghosts there and in the July sun all over Stef the place alone seems happy, too.

Stef points to the radio.

‘The heatwave may cause property damage and disruption to society,’ the news anchor says.

‘It’s all over the news, all the time,’ Stef says and he gets a little bit wide-eyed about this.

‘Boring.’ Sieg puts the glass in the sink. ‘Let’s go have ice cream.’ He turns the radio down and Stef, still strangely quiet, follows him outside. They race all the way to the bar and are red-faced reaching it. The bar-keeper eyes them suspiciously, but they have money and want some ice cream, please, so there’s not much he can do about them, ruining the looks and air of his would-be-proper-if-not-for-them establishment. Sieg and Stef laugh at all this, ice cream on their chins and noses.

‘So,’ Stef turns serious in the middle of a snort. ‘You know Jessica has birthday today, right?’ Sieg takes a bit of ice cream.

‘Sure,’ he replies. It occurs to him he doesn’t know how old Jessica is going to turn. Sometimes she seemed much younger than him and sometimes she seemed much older. A thing with girls for Sieg is that they annoy him and intimidate him all at once. He’s hot in his face and must fight the urge to run from their touch. There’s something about their smooth faces and glossy lips, they seem so cool and Sieg feels like burning all the time.

‘You coming?’ Stef goes on asking, going for the all casual sort of voice and failing at it. Sieg sinks in the chair under his intent gaze. It isn’t clear to him whether Stef wants Sieg to go or is only weirdly interested. There’s a possibility of Kim setting him up to do it, because Kim and Jessica are like that, the way Sieg and Stef are like that. Double package, Sieg be damned not to follow the product description.

‘I don’t know, you?’ he tries to win himself some time.

‘Yeah, Kim would eat me otherwise,’ Stef says with a dreamy look. For a moment Sieg imagines Kim as a large shining bug, a ladybug, a boy-devouring creature. It takes him another moment to remind himself of her face and doe-like eyes. ‘Plus, she’s nice,’ Stef goes on talking and Sieg lets his head rest on the table. It’s all due to heat, the maze in his mind and the fire in his guts. ‘Jessica, Jessica is nice,’ Stef specifies and Sieg bites his lips not to let the groan out. There’s blood somewhere.

‘What hour?’ he asks and tries to hold his heart down.

‘It’s at eight,’ Stef answers slowly. They look at each other. It’s all heat and Sieg, making things as simple as talking with Stef turn into large monsters. Sieg wonders if this is what it’s going to be from now on, world getting hotter and people getting tired with Sieg. ‘It’s near there, you know, the street where the all old ladies sell flowers on holidays,’ Stef explains. It’s one of their jokes, the mismatched Catholic street where there live people who celebrate their saint lady claiming her right to all heavens. Sieg and Stef once rode straight into the crowd waving with songs and candles, and flowers. It’s something you see only once in a town like this. Sieg wonders if it means Jessica is Catholic, but he doesn’t care all that much for it. To him, Jessica will always be someone he accidentally knocked on while passing by. A whole world of a person he misses, it hits him and again, he doesn’t care. There’s only one person Sieg wants to discover whole.

‘OK’ he says. ‘I’ll be there.’ For Stef and a little bit for himself. He remembers water shining with the July sunrays piercing it and he feels like standing up to Jessica and her wide pink mouth and her soft quick hands and her always waiting eyes. Let all this drumming in his rib-cage be worth something.

*

A warm July evening falls into a sultry July night, spilling all over the town like gasoline. Dogs howl and glass bursts on such nights. Eddy is out and dad can’t stop pacing all around the home. The heat is getting into him; he has been close to forbidding Sieg leave. It was late and Sieg hadn’t told him about his plans, he said, and made an Eddy face at Sieg. Sieg made his best Sieg face and was allowed to go, if he returned at a sensible hour. There are no sensible hours during such night, Sieg thinks and worries if the tires don’t melt on the burning hot asphalt. It’s a night of a very few parties and those which Sieg rides by don’t seem like good ones. There’s music too loud and booze to warm, and too many people too close. Must be the same in Jessica’s house. Its radio is booming all over the Catholic street, where all the flowers have burnt long time ago because of all the heat and crumbled are tossed over by hot wind. Sieg enters through the open door and there’s a moment he is quite sure he’s dissolving in the crowd with its sounds and touches.

It takes him time and some elbow-pushing to make it to the nearest wall. It’s not far, but there’s people everywhere. They move together to the music like some terrifying many-headed monster. Some have their mouth and hands on each other. Nothing of it looks like a Jessica Party or even a Kim Party. There are too many too old people and someone has brought beer here. More than beer, Sieg notices, and worse. It’s a simple and sad case of an alone girl’s house overrun and turned into an animal-cave, something Eddy jokes about. _Those idiots_ , he says, _don’t even lock mommy-and-daddy-s bedrooms and are all teary seeing it the morning after_. There are some girls looking like Jessica and dressed up like Kim, all afraid under sparkling tops and bubblegum chapstick. Sieg rests against the wall and tries to get a full breath. It’s hard, too little oxygen for this party, they’re all going to suffocate. He spots Stef and Kim under the opened window, all tangled and ignoring the room around them. Sieg is sick.

His dad may not believe it, but Sieg has always been a nice and boring boy. No drinking, no smoking, no anything. He doesn’t know how to act here. It must be acting, but what type of role does he choose? Banging music makes his head explode and there’s a guy screaming right next to him. The guy’s girlfriend, turns out, is a whore. A house full of Eddies, Sieg thinks closing his eyes, what a hell.

‘You came!’ he hears. Jessica is standing in the front of him, all pink flushed, scent of perfumes Sieg doesn’t know, mixed with smell of beer and sweat, hanging around her. There’re two black smudges under her eyes and some of the gloss in the corner of her mouth. It’s a second of staring at each other and then Jessica kisses him. Trapped between her and the wall, Sieg can only wait when she breaks away to catch some breath. She looks drunk and sad, and like having nothing better to do than to kiss him. Sieg is sicker.

‘Jessica’ he shouts and she blinks. ‘Is there a room, where we –’ he stops to swallow the vomit, ‘an empty room?’

Whatever Jessica says gets lost in the roar of the party. She takes his hand and laughing, she leads him to the stairs. There’re people on the steps and there’re people on the corridor, and there’re people in the bathroom. There’re some in her bedroom, too, but they go when she shoos them away. Somebody wishes them good luck. Sieg wishes himself some, too. He can’t remember why has come here. He’s sick and hot and dizzy.

‘Happy birthday’ he mumbles slumping to the floor. Jessica sits next to him, arm to arm and thigh to thigh. One of them has chills. Her bright head falls on his arm and she tangles their fingers together. Sieg is too weak to tangle himself out. It’s all very bad. She’s so determined and focused, and he’s losing himself here now. For some reason, girls are terrifyingly good at such things, making all situations something from the script and forcing others to follow the rules. It’s because theirs are more suffocating than those of boys.

‘I was worried,’ Jessica says nicely. Sieg wants to run away from her, all nice, sitting in her nice room full of nice things. ‘When you didn’t answer my calls,’ she explains herself carefully, slowly, as if being aware of Sieg’s terror. ‘But it’s OK, now you’re here.’

‘I’m –‘ Sieg says and stops, feeling Jessica’s warm breath on his cheek. There’s a plush toy he got her lying on her neatly cleaned up bed. ‘I don’t want it.’ Jessica shifts and her breath goes away. Sieg hears it, it’s all shaky. When he glances at her, she’s still trying to smile.

‘What?’ she asks, not harsher by one bit. There’s a familiar look in her eyes, all waiting for Sieg to take the nice back-out she’s offering him like a present with a ribbon and a card full of sweet things attached. It makes Sieg’s throat go dry. He uses a script-phrase, a melodrama excuse. It only happens to be the truth.

‘I like somebody else.’

Jessica freezes. She tries blinking, but when she opens her wetter and wetter eyes, they’re in the same place, an ex-boyfriend and an ex-girlfriend, in the princess’ bedroom with the animal party thumping all around them.

‘Oh.’

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s fine. Since when?’

‘It’s been weeks.’

‘Longer than we’ve been –‘

‘Yeah.’

‘All this, us, was it a bet?’

‘No. No.’

‘It’s cruel,’ Jessica says finally. ‘To break up with a girl on her birthday. Don’t do it the other one’, she stands up, fixes her drees and leaves, clacking of her heels soon lost.

For a moment, Sieg is afraid he isn’t going to move and he’ll have to be carried out by Jessica’s parents the morning they finally return with Jessica’s dog which was probably the only thing Sieg liked about her. To have thought doing it all would be some sort of bravery, what a joke. It’s only hurting people, whatever he does, it’s always this. He eyes the plush toy. Jessica could burn it, like a voodoo doll, not that it’d made Sieg feel any worse. He is burning all the time, anyway.

*

It’s a full blown July day, making flowers burn and bones melt. The heat has bleached Sieg’s mind: there’s only the rhythmical movement of his limbs and the fire in his chest. He doesn’t know sky is turning red and the tracks are emptying. No one sees him fall down.

*

‘Hype-what?’

‘Hyperthermia, Ed. I’m not sure, it’d be better to ask a nurse.’

‘Like hell I’m talking to one of these –‘

‘Language.’

‘Yeah, yeah. So what, he just blacks out because it’s hot?’

‘He was very tired and hasn’t drink enough water, and drunk something else last night. Many factors, they said.’

Sieg is hearing the voices weak against a buzz he can’t find a source for. He tries to move and realizes he’s lying in an unfamiliar bed clothed in pajamas scratchier than his are. There’re rustles and breaths, and beeps. It’s cool.

‘You called the man?’

‘Yes, I did. He was surprised. You’d think being a coach for his whole life would teach him something, but no, he was surprised.’

‘Fucker.’

Dad doesn’t bother with correcting Eddy’s language again. Sieg hasn’t in him to have a talk with the two of them now, so he restrains himself from stretching and doesn’t open his eyes.

His head hasn’t stopped hurting, but it does less so. If he reaches for them, the memories of last twenty-something hours will unfold. He tries poking it. The party goes first, Sieg stumbling down the stairs and falling into the crowd, somebody getting him a can of beer. Then some more. It was because of many factors, as the doctors called it, many factors: there was Jessica with her wet eyes and an echo of the word _cruel_ ringing in his ears, and there was the unbearable heat, and there were his strained muscles crying under his itching skin, and there was Marc, who wasn’t at the party at all, but who gave Sieg a bottle of water with a strange smile, and Sieg shouldn’t have dwelt, but with beer pouring down his throat, he didn’t know better.

It is a quality of Marc, something that made Sieg drop Stef right into the sand all those days ago. Sieg held himself back, but he lost control and then it felt all too natural. He was sinking down in the Jessica’s party which was looking more and more like a funfair and he was thinking of Marc. It hurt. Beer didn’t mute it down at all. If anything, the beer made it sprawl and grow large, and incomprehensible. Sieg wasn’t able to trace reasons and consequences. He was trapped in the maze of violent pictures which made no sense together. It was all rolling around and around his head, some carousel, and it made him dizzier and sicker.

Stef left Kim and took Sieg out, and Sieg was mad, and about to burst into tears on all the way home. His dad yelled at them. The Sieg Problem had reached the proportions of The Ed Problem, so it didn’t feel unfair. He got a curfew and was banned from all things his dad could imagine banning him from. There weren’t many of them. At dawn, with hammers cracking his skull inside out, Sieg sneaked out for the training.

He can’t remember if he has seen Marc there.

Dad and Eddy are gone, so Sieg opens his eyes and jumps out of bed. The room is swimming around him, but he regains balance before the nurses get to him. The buzz, he sees, is coming from the mechanical fan standing on the windowsill. Sieg gets to it and looks out. The sun hasn’t set yet and if he squints his eyes, he still can see the air wavering above the streets. It makes the town a mirage or a nightmare, something fantastical. Sieg rests his forehead against the glass and observes. The moment you realize a nightmare is a nightmare is when you begin to wake up. He learned this after his mom’s crash.

People are going to worry when they hear about the hospital and the whole hyperthermia business. Sieg doesn’t like the thought. Lately, he’s really been a worrisome person. The familiar fire starts again, even though he’s standing right next to the fan. There’s no use trying to contain it. Sieg hopes that if he lets the fire go all the way it wants, one day it’ll leave him. It’s seems easier to hope for it in the cool hospital room.

Sieg returns to his bed and dives in his bag which the nurses have put in the bed’s legs. Here’s the phone with the unanswered calls. Twenty-one from Jessica, two from Stef, zero from Marc. Sieg wonders if Marc has learned about the Hyperthermia Business already and if it is worrying him. Guilty as he feels of being worrisome, Sieg needs Marc to care. It’s irrational: Marc has a family he adores and a life he loves and would be all content, weren’t it for caring too much for the depressing case Sieg is. But Sieg got spoiled, all those days of undivided attention and Marc daring him and waiting for him to rise to it. It is ungraspable, but Sieg has developed a deep need for Marc caring and now, he won’t be satisfied with anyone else filling in. Sieg would start doing push-ups now, but the nurses are already eyeing him suspiciously. The only thing to do is to stretch and stare at the ceiling.

It all comes down to the problem of loyalties. Sieg had been avoiding the choice and Marc called it a _charade,_ what made Sieg feel like a clown or a con-man. Marc, Sieg muses as the nurses are fussing around him, has solved the problem by being loyal to himself first. Sieg doubts Marc sees it in these terms. More probably, he doesn’t see it at all, just goes on being painfully sincere as if it were the most natural thing. It requires some trust in the world, and the disappointment seems to be a dangerous side-effect, but Marc apparently doesn’t mind. He can’t stop being true and that’s it. It makes Sieg all scared and warm.

It’s the last thought he has before falling asleep. For the first time in many nights, he dreams.

*

The morning, for some reason, unsettles Marc. It’s all hazy, him being just awake and walking down the stairs to join his parents and Neetlje. They’d care to eat breakfasts together even if it wasn’t as convenient as it is, for Marc’s parents need to prepare the parlor and Neetlje isn’t much of a sleeper anyway. Before Marc enters the kitchen, he hears the singing of the kettle and it eases the tension in his arms in an unfailing way it always does.

‘Morning’ his dad calls, mouth full of yoghurt and honey, and raisins. Neetlje waves with her fork at him and his mom yawns _._ Marc takes his seat and begins systematically devouring cinnamon rolls thick with butter.

‘I woke up with a funny feeling today,’ he announces swallowing the last bit of the third roll.

Dad scratches his chin with a spoon, leaving a big yoghurt stain behind. ‘Must be the change of weather,’ he says eventually.

‘The heatwave,’ mom supplies, ‘It’s over.’

Marc nods. The cinnamon rolls are gone. He’d love to stay for another while with his still sleepy and mumbling family, but there’re trainings and the coach is convinced they have been too easy on themselves sine the relay race. All of them, but Sieg, it is the coach’s new catch-phrase, used whenever Sieg isn’t around. Personally, Marc finds it alarming. Sieg, being Sieg, has this thing with sweating the stress out. It’s quite a difference, Sieg running for the thrill of it and Sieg running away from whatever monster is haunting him. There’s been a while since Marc last saw Sieg thrilled about anything. He takes a moment to feed the monkey with the impossibility of him coming up to Sieg and saying to take care, and then he moves on with his morning, funny and cloudy and windy. It’d be better if he put his hoodie on, he realizes taking another turn, not stopping the bike.

The tracks are full of nervous murmuring when Marc arrives. There’s been wild parties and wilder fights all over last two days, it seems. Marc has spent those building a will-be tree-house for Neetlje. So far, he has set up a small fenced platform, perfect for close observation of branches and little else.

‘Something’s up with the babies,’ Tom announces joining to Marc in the middle of the warm-up. ‘Last time Ginger was down with his very first hangover and today it’s Blue Eyes, and he’s never late’ he says.

‘You asked Stef what was the matter?’ Marc asks and it must have come out strange, because Tom has stopped pretending to be touching his toes and is openly staring at him. Marc doesn’t look away.

‘Whoa,’ Tom whistles, ‘you alright?’

Marc takes a breath.

‘It depends.’

Tom isn’t a person to ask for an explanation from Marc. Their friendship doesn’t run this deep. Marc doesn’t mind. It’d take guts to be his friend, some scared boy once told him as he was done with listing the reasons for which him and Marc regularly kissing in the school bathroom was the most Marc could expect of him. They didn’t do much of it afterwards. With Tom, it’s different. It’s spending time with each other because they don’t quite fit anywhere else and have a similar sense of humor. There used to be more of people like this, but Tom is the only one who hasn’t left and wasn’t bothered with the slurs thrown at Marc from time to time. It’s clear to both of them Tom stays for Marc at his best and isn’t going to caress him through his worse, but it’s enough for Marc. At least, it’s honest. No kissing. Their mechanism for the moments like this one is Marc shutting up and Tom cracking jokes until the mood goes away.

Tom’s determinedly awful humor has them grinning when they’re done with the warm-up and start to run. Marc’s head is all air and light again until he catches himself studying the tracks in the search of Sieg. It’s an instinct which had been evolving before the race and which Marc thought he has unlearnt afterwards. There’s no Sieg around. Marc returns to his run and it goes alright, but then he stops again, realizing he can’t stop scanning the grounds of the club. It makes the old monkey raise its head again. If the things between Sieg and him weren’t as messed up, he could text him and ask. Make sure it’s some silly boy adventure and not a - Marc pauses there. He hasn’t got enough practice in pessimism to be able to finish the sentence.

The pauses become cyclical and the intervals of thoughtless running are shortening. The coach approaches him and Marc doesn’t see the point in hiding the distraction from his face.

‘Marc,’ the coach says and Marc stands still at the sound of his voice. ‘You’re looking bit ill, take a break,’ he hears. His eyebrows must have shut upwards, because the coach’s face darkens. ‘Well, in the present conditions –‘ his voice falters. ‘Sieger, you know him, he has got himself in the hospital. Oh, it’s nothing too serious,’ the coach adds looking at Marc. ‘Just the heatwave stuff, something like a fever, needs to spend a few days close to the water,’ the coach babbles. ‘Yes, close to the water, it always does you good, doesn’t it. Well!’ he finishes, blushing and stiff. ‘Don’t stay too long in the sun!’

Marc doesn’t point out the sky is all grey. At the moment, he doesn’t notice too much of it himself. There’s little of thought in what he does next. It’s a sprint all the way to the locker-room and hopping on the bike, and ride lighting fast to the river, and his heart somersaulting.

*

The day isn’t a July day at all. There’re clouds and cool wind, and the river is  metal-grey instead of sunny-green. It’s all different from the day they came there, their pulses quick from the training and the summer, and the new friendship. But the wooden platform is still rocking and there’s always some sky framed by the branches heavy with leaves. Sieg is dwelling. He thinks the name is a problem, if anything. _Dwelling_ , that’s his dad name for this and _pussying_ is Eddy’s. It makes Sieg feel stupid for not knowing things and trying to figure them out. As if there were a rule saying _boys don’t think about things_ , just it. It’s better go crazy with anger than with thinking. There are, now Sieg is at it, many rules. And scripts. Not only with Jessica, it’s with everyone.

He has thought a lot those past hours, first bound to the hospital bed and now stuck at the platform. His dad let him go to the river rather than guarded and crowded pool only after Sieg promised to do nothing else but lie down. Sieg knows better than to break promises, and so he is stuck and thinking. It’s not all that bad, too. The nurses gave him some stuff and now his head feels a much more peaceful place to be in. The heatwave got him hard, he hears all the time. Not like he hasn’t helped it, his dad said, once, teary around the edges.

Rules and scripts, Sieg repeats and lets his hand fall in the water, scripts and rules. His dad has this phrase, _We live together. That’s why we have rules_ , something he says when The Ed Problem gets unbearable. Rules make houses and towns stand, and lack of rules makes for ruins. They’re what made Sieg and dad get up from the bed on the mornings after mom’s funeral. Eddy, too, has his rules, a code for being rough. It makes two sets, contradicting in but a few points (see: _dwelling_ ) and following both is like running forward and backward at the same time.

Plus, there’s Marc. Sieg pushes the water around him. It makes the blood in his fingers run slower and his head weigh less.

It’s impossible to fit Marc in the rules made for Sieg. He’s such a wild force, Sieg thinks, and droplets of water coursing down his wrist remind him of that. A real boy full of real things. Next to him, Sieg feels like paper, something foldable and burnable, and disposable. With him, Sieg felt something else. He can’t find a name for it, because he’s afraid it’ll make it less. He’s bad with words, anyway. They rest clumped at the bottom of his throat and fall into his lungs, and make his chest heavy. His hand is numb in the water. Marc is too large for words. It was all doing with him, too. Running with him and laughing with him, and pulling Neetlje’s up, and up. Jessica, she was more of a word-person. It feels stupid to compare Marc with her, but it was Marc who has started it, hasn’t he? Sieg isn’t really sure he can figure this out. _Charade_ , he thinks, and the Loyalties Problem. Now, he’d like a swim.

It’s difficult to recognize the change in sky’s shades when it’s all so grey. Sieg opens his eyes wide and looks for the sun. It could be here, it could be there. All he hears is water and frogs and leafs. Then, a bike, and before Sieg has one thought more formed, his body jolts up and his head turns to the shore. His body used to be more careful than this. Sieg doesn’t care at the moment.

Marc is standing there, the bike kicked aside, heels still rolling. All Sieg’s attempts to explain him fail at the sight. There’s no smile at Marc’s face and his gaze makes Sieg feel exposed and raw. The platform is all slippery and shaking underneath him.

‘Hi,’ he says, not moving. His muscles stretch in an automatic smile he’s quick to wear away. It’s important to do this right, Sieg thinks and panics, realizing there’re no rules to fall back on. Marc’s out of rules, he reminds himself, it’s all natural with him. Still, Sieg has managed to ruin it.

‘I heard about the hospital,’ Marc says and takes a step forward. There remains a river to cross before they’re side to side. Sieg tries to read Marc’s face but it’s all closed up now. He can’t tell whether Marc doesn’t care or he’s locking it all up. Why would he do this, Sieg doesn’t know. He would have hated it, Sieg thinks. He must have, back when Sieg expected him to. Oh, he stops, that’s why. ‘How are you feeling?’ Marc asks, pulling Sieg out of his mind. The question catches him unprepared.

‘Not bad,’ here goes the automat again. The rules, Sieg realizes, are all over his body, craved in his bones. His mouth answers before he gets the time to think. ‘Is the coach mad?’ he goes on. More true, but it carries an unpleasant echo. All Sieg seems to do is worry about people being mad at him. For breaking the rules, for obliging them, for taking liberties with the script, for having a script of his life ready in the first place. It’s all there is with Sieg and Marc is all out of it, and Sieg doesn’t know how to agree those two facts with each other. They’re at war.

‘Mad afraid, yeah,’ Marc says and Sieg sees his posture relax. Alright. So there’s a war and no peace in the near future. But they can always have a truce. The edge to Marc’s voice when he says _afraid_ makes Sieg hope it will be accepted. Marc has come to the riverside, after all. He has come and he has spoken, and the heatwave’s over, and this time, Sieg isn’t going to hurt anybody.

‘You’re up for a swim?’ he says and hears his voice croak. He likes the sound of it, something real at last. A corner of Marc’s mouth curls up and he takes another step into the water. He throws his sneakers away.

‘I am.’

Marc’s face all lit up when he says it and it makes Sieg believe in many things. He watches Marc take his clothes off and can’t focus enough to wonder whether Marc was thinking similar things, watching Sieg do the same, a long time ago. Marc’s at the platform in a blink and it doesn’t take another for him to push Sieg off. They both swallow river-water when they laugh. It’s hands all over bodies, legs tangled, heads close. It stars raining and they race to the shore, kicking and pushing each other back. They are soaking wet. They don’t kiss. They go back to the town side by side all the way, high on the storm.

*

The last day of July passes unnoticed, pale and blown away with the wind. Sieg stays at home, his dad caught between being disappointed with him, again disobedient, and showering him with awkward affection, still worried about The Evening and now The Heatwave, all parts of The (growingly overwhelming) Sieg Problem. They move around the house in uncrossing trajectories. Eddy, too, is affected. It shows in an outburst of eruptions and strange gestures of kindness offered afterwards. Only this morning, after a fit caused by Sieg’s absent-mindedly prepared and, as a result, burnt scrambled eggs which Eddy was meant to eat, it was _by the way, you can borrow the moped sometime_. It made Sieg feel guilty, because he forgot Eddy could be something else than invested into his own rebellion and pictured him a villain, an end-game enemy boss, in the story of this summer and Marc he has been trying to construct. It’s what Sieg’s been up to on this day, laying on his bed in the still milky light, and thinking. With breaks for push-ups and showers.

He’s thinking of Marc. There’re no new unanswered calls on his mobile.

None are made before the dim August dawn. Sieg wakes up breathless from a dream he can’t quite remember and he needs to take a shower before he leaves, so it’s all morning sun when he’s out at last. He’s still the first in the locker-room, though. As he takes his shirt off, he almost wishes for Marc to enter and give Sieg a chance to – Sieg isn’t yet sure. All he knows is the need for difference. Last time, July in the full bloom and them seeing each other for the first time since The Swimming, or that’s how Sieg used to not-call it in his head when he was not-dwelling on it, last time it went wrong. Sieg’s whole body was against him, stiff under Marc’s gaze. His smirk made Sieg’s face burn. The burning part is still there, but it’s not killing him anymore. Maybe it’s just the way his heart and blood work, maybe it’s the warm-up after the long period of being out of use. Sieg doesn’t dislike the thought.

On his way out of the locker-room, he bumps into Stef. He waits up so they can go together.

‘It’s been insane with you out,’ Stef tells him as he’s changing. Sieg is trying not to stare, but he can’t understand the way Stef goes on with his body. Marc handles it as a fulfillment of some truth-and-dare of nature’s, both at a time. But with Stef, it’s another way. Figuring it out makes Sieg feel weird, so he looks away. ‘The coach, he’s turned positively loony. You should’ve heard the man,’ Stef goes on the outside. Before they start the practice all proper, he turns serious and asks: ‘You’re alright now, aren’t you?’

Sieg shrugs.

‘You know,’ he says and doesn’t finish the sentence. Stef takes a moment and gives a reluctant nod to it. Some time passes with all the sound being their quiet breaths and they go for the tracks which slowly fill with other boys. The August sunlight grows on Sieg when he realizes looking at the white lines doesn’t make his eyes hurt like it used to. As he runs, not using himself all up at once, he lets his gaze slide swiftly from a boy to a boy. Sieg allows himself to take a moment for each, so it maintains the guise of an accident. It feels weird. Sieg tries not to feel weird. It’s about him being more sincere, so he tries hard.

Eventually, he spots Marc with the basketball at hand, running around with Tom. Sieg nudges Stef lightly and points in the direction. When they’re done with their circle, they cross the tracks and arrive just to see Marc make a score that shouldn’t be possible at all. His body stretches and for a moment he is large and sunlit, and more beautiful than any carefully shot study-photo Sieg has seen in all the magazines. The sight makes his chest bubble with laughter and fear. He clenches his teeth and hopes it’ll clench his limbs, too, because he feels his legs prepare for the run in the direction opposite to Marc. It takes some counting for him to calm down a bit. He’s breaking away from a routine and the routines are something like the rules. And he can’t not think how it’s much more than a game of basketball. He’s making a choice there and the thing about choices is they demand being repeated all the time. It’s scary and Sieg isn’t quite sure he’s going to make it. He looks at Marc looking at him and tries to shut his overrunning mind. _To hell with it._

‘Two on two?’ Sieg asks. Tom chuckles and Marc grins. His gaze focuses on Sieg and it makes his grin go somewhat hard. Sieg recognizes it as a smile of a person who spent many days missing it and knowing why. Sieg’s seen it all around the home and in his mirror, too, although never that wide. It makes Sieg feel something burn up in his gut.

‘Yeah,’ Marc says.

‘Big boys versus babies’ Tom suggests. Stef inhales loudly and it makes them all laugh for a while.

‘Not fair, Tom,’ Marc says. ‘You and Stef versus me and Sieg. All happy?’ he asks and the and it sounds strangely serious. The time slows down again. Sieg isn’t happy and he can’t help noticing the decision means he and Marc will spend most of the game apart. There’s not much he can do about it, so he shrugs. _To hell with it_ , he repeats and keeps his mind silent as they’re all running and laughing, with something of a July air around them. It gets warmer and brighter. Little before the noon, the game is over and they’re standing with the shadow of the nets around the field all funny over their bodies and faces. Sieg falls back on those and lets his eyelids drop. It’s a relief, to stand with Marc and Stef and Tom, all together again, without invisible lines dividing them. There’s still a distance between him and Marc, but when Sieg looks up, Marc is smiling at him as much as at the others. There’s an edge to it and some spark in his eyes which make it seem like a Sieg Smile. The possibility of having a special smile from Marc reserved, made for such a sunny day, has Sieg warm all over. He smiles back, not hearing whatever the talk is about.

‘You look like fainting,’ Marc observes. It’s loud and Tom and Stef stop talking. Sieg opens his eyes and stares. The remark sounds heavy with meaning, at least in his ears. There’s something about Sieg wanting Marc to leave the locker-room on the morning all those days ago. During the game, nothing has happened, them separated as Sieg has predicted it, but Sieg somehow knows it’s Marc making sure about something. Having him repeat the choice.

‘No, I’m fine,’ Sieg says and hopes he’s looking relaxed. It takes him a moment to will his body into the posture and stop the rushing of his mind. It’s only Stef and Tom here. Stef told Sieg that he and Marc had a good timing, and didn’t say a word about the break-up with Jessica. And Tom is Marc’s friend, so here’s that. Sieg can do this. Sieg is going to make himself capable of doing this.

‘You sure?’ Marc is wearing The Sieg Smile. ‘I could catch you if you fell,’ he goes on and Sieg feels the old fire starting. It’s Stef and Tom, he repeats. If he could take his mind apart, like a broken bike, and exchange somewhere parts which make him afraid for new and working ones. It seems an error in the construction, Sieg being all scared of Marc. He doesn’t want to be. There’s something in the rules about it, if a boy wants to kiss other boys it means no good for him and it’s best to punch him, and see his teeth fall with blood. ‘You just need to warn me, that’s all,’ Marc ends easily. Sieg is aware of his mind finding a loop and he knows using it - shrugging the comment off and laughing at it – would put the weight of it on Marc. The rules urge him to do so. Sieg’s fighting them. Marc’s eyes are all wide with expectations. _To hell with it, to hell with it, to hell with it._

‘Deal,’ Sieg breaths out, all quick and too tight. Marc laughs and Stef and Tom take the clue. After a moment, Sieg gives in the laughter, too. It’s laughing the adrenaline away, something Sieg has perfected. He realizes the mirror feel of the situation. A reverse, all this. Marc has avoided the possibility of connecting with Sieg no one would think more of and he has forced Sieg to act on it with people around and looking. No, it wasn’t forcing, Sieg corrects himself, it was a choice. Sieg doesn’t wish for making a different one.

*

A sleepy August afternoon falls on the town like a thrown gauze veil, thin to the point of being unnoticeable and making everything seem peaceful and still. Sieg and the others, keeping together for the whole training, head for the locker-room together, too, and somehow in breaks between pushes and laughs, they manage to change. There’s a moment of awkward shuffling around the bikes.

‘Kim and I are going out, so,’ Stef says. Tom _ooh_ s and eyes Marc who is shifting his weight from one feet to another and isn’t looking anywhere in particular. They’re still all standing in an unbroken circle and Sieg feels the silence itching on his skin. It hasn’t happened before, Sieg thinks. No one has seen him come to the riverside with Marc and if there was anyone to see it, Sieg wouldn’t come. That’s the way it went after the weekend-trip: Sieg didn’t look at Marc and left, shutting the memory of moonlit beach somewhere deep down and convincing himself it didn’t mean much if it happened at night. Nights and heatwaves, there were only so many excuses Sieg could make. There were none in the quiet and proper August afternoon.

‘I’d like to go for ice cream,’ Sieg says, one word at a time. It falls flat and sounds out of place and out of moment. Sometimes Sieg and Stef get ice cream together because they know each other since they’re five. They simply don’t grow out of things and haven’t yet learn ice cream is more of a Girl Thing. A Boy Thing would be grabbing some beer. It’s what made Eddy call them _homos_ , almost as much as hearing _you have beautiful eyes_. Caring and observation, and beauty, and ice cream are all Girl Things and if it isn’t Sieg and Stef, it’s weird to do it. Sieg knows it and Marc knows it and they can’t pretend not to know it. Sieg tried it and it didn’t work.

‘Alright,’ Marc says, eyes up on Sieg. ‘Tom, you?’ he asks, not looking away.

‘I don’t feel like it,’ Tom replies. It’s settled and they ride away: Stef heading for the unassuming center with the town’s only cinema where single teenagers go to watch bad movies and teenagers coupled to make out in the dark with the taste of pop-corn on their mouth; Tom down the street to the slightly newer and therefore largely disliked part of the town where he must live. It surprises Sieg who has always thought Tom and Marc went back home together the way Stef and Sieg do. It means Marc has an habit of going home alone.

They ride together in an oddly orderly manner. Sieg doesn’t want it to be serious, but it turns serious. It makes his hands sweat and he wonders if they will ever get back to being carefree with each other. Well, there was yesterday, Sieg rationalizes, but it was a truce and truces are temporary, and to build some peace, there needs to be – an effort, he decides after a while, some real effort. Rules, he thinks, there need to be good rules set and followed. It makes his head hurt: he thought rules made it go wrong in the first place, but he can’t live without them and there are bad rules and good rules, Eddy rules and Dad rules, but if they made it go wrong, does it mean all the rules were wrong? And can Sieg think up better ones?

He realizes they don’t go to the Marc’s, only to the little bar which is a Sieg and Stef’s place for getting ice cream and Sieg and Jessica’s place for a date. The date, since none followed. There’re girls and girls’ bikes there, and Sieg feels watched, but he goes after Marc and makes an order and pays. They sit next to the window. Sieg glances at Marc and feels his mind turn blank. Marc is looking at Sieg and not saying anything. It’s all heavy silence between them. Sieg doesn’t know how to unload it. He’d like Marc to tell him another story about his family. They’re somewhat exotic to Sieg: a family who isn’t a set of problems and grievances and losses, only friends all in love with each other. Marc’s face is all bright and open when he talks about them and Sieg likes it. Only he doesn’t think it’s alright for him to ask, now. He rests his chin on his hands.

‘How’s the ice cream?’ he asks. Marc pulls a face and it makes Sieg laugh.

‘All watery,’ Marc replies after making a show of tasting it carefully. They watch out of the window for a while, looking past their reflections on it. There’re girls and girls’ bikes and they’re moving. Sieg ponders girls. He didn’t use to notice them at the school, except two or three incidents where one of them tried to make something out of him. It never leaded to anything. Girls with their make-up and their perfumes and their clothes. Sieg was scared of it all, with Jessica. She seemed so equipped and he came so bare. Her touch sent a chill down Sieg’s spine. He wonders if it’s the same with all girls or if it was so only because Sieg has already met Marc. They can’t be monsters, Sieg thinks, since some people love them and they love them back. His mom – he isn’t sure if he can think it, it hurts. But his mom was a girl once and she couldn’t have been a boy-devouring bug, never. They must be people, girls. It’s only Sieg’s thinking which makes them strange.

One of the girls strays. Her hair has blue highlights all over, so Sieg doesn’t recognize her at first. The shirt and jeans short are familiar, though. It’s Jessica and she’s looking at him and pretending not to. He waves his hand, uncertain whether he should smile. She blinks and waves back and hops on her bike and sprints after her friends. Her ears are red. Sieg feels sad, but he mostly is relieved. He is less so, when he sees Marc’s hard stare. Marc says nothing and turns the plastic spoon all over in his hands. To Sieg, words are the dirty job and he doesn’t like it thrown at him. He guesses it’s justified, though.

‘We broke up,’ Sieg says, all on one breath, almost swallowing it. His spoon sinks in the melting ice cream. Must have been really watery to have melt so quickly. ‘Me and –‘ Sieg points through the glass to the now emptied yard before the bar. Then, he looks at Marc. Marc looks at him. It takes them a moment. An insanely long moment.

‘About time,’ Marc says at last and takes another bit of ice cream. Sieg wonders if that’s going to be it, the fixing done and them again what they should be. It isn’t, because there’s still some tension to Marc’s arms and Sieg doesn’t stop burning. He’d like to say it isn’t going to happen again and he doesn’t want a _charade_ and he wants – he wants – but the words are heavy and Sieg can’t lift them from the bottom of his throat. They make it go all tight.

‘This ice cream,’ Marc speaks again in a lighter voice and Sieg is smiling already, because it sounds like a beginning of some joke, ‘is a farce.’ Sieg laughs, because the word sounds like the punch-line. A _farce_. It feels good to hear such word said like a joke. As in _who’d use it for serious, anyway?_ It makes Sieg feels less clumsy about the holes in his own sentences. ‘Say what, let’s go and get some real stuff,’ Marc says and there’s The Sieg Smile all over his face. A special daring smile with a special sparkle to it. A dare to which Sieg isn’t afraid to rise. He does.

‘I’m in,’ Sieg answers and he says it like he means it and all other things he can’t say. He holds Marc’s gaze to make him understand all the meanings of those two words. There’s also an apology for not being able to do better, since it feels like a mild form of insincerity, not being able to name the things you feel. Not yet, Sieg thinks, yet being the important part.

They leave. The town is slowly awakening for the sunset and the evening. The unpopular movie which has been playing for the last two hours is over now and the news anchors enter. There’s a speak of weather. It’s August and there won’t be any heatwaves near soon, and the sky is going to be very clear this night. As they ride, Marc’s foot is on the saddle of Sieg’s bike more often than it’s not.

When they arrive at the parlor, there’s still some people there. Marc goes between the tables with the swiftness of somebody who does it every evening and Sieg follows clumsily behind. The clients are mostly young people and families with children, all brightly clothed and with an air of contentment around them. It makes Sieg feel out of place, again. They’re all so relaxed and at peace with their bodies and their minds. Marc belongs here in the way Sieg doesn’t feel belonging anywhere, except maybe the tracks, on the days when he leaves himself behind. In his home he’s uncomfortable, pressed to the walls by the emptiness of it, sometimes. Marc doesn’t act as if he thought of any such thing, ever. He bends over the counter and gives his mom a kiss on a cheek and says:

‘Sieg came over to see the tree-house.’

Marc’s mom turns to look at Sieg and the recognition settles on her face. There’s something unbearably soft about it. The Moms have it when they look at him and remember the word _half-orphan_. He isn’t sure if she knows, since Marc hasn’t necessarily told her, but Sieg suspects he’s giving himself away, anyway. It’s the way his t-shirt is always frayed and his hair is messy. This boy, people think, doesn’t have his Mom.

‘Hello, Sieg,’ Marc’s mom says and she has such a nice voice Sieg thinks he’ll cry. ‘Do you want some ice cream?’ she asks and in a blink, Marc’s going behind the counter and coming out with a box of the ice cream with the weirdest name. _Blueberry Intergalactic_ , it reads. They go to the garden and further, where the forest begins. Marc’s house must be somewhere on the edge of the town, then. Between the ruled order and the wilderness. How fitting, Sieg thinks again.

‘I haven’t got around building the ladder,’ Marc announces when they’re under the tree and they burst out laughing. They climb the tree slowly, carrying the box between them. They reach the top after ten long minutes, more tired than they thought they’d be. They laugh about it, too. Sieg finds it easy to laugh. The garden is half-wild and the rules don’t apply. It’s all him and Marc, and there’s no one to see them. They’re free to do anything they want, hidden in the leaves under the darkening sky. Sieg shouldn’t feel so relieved as it shouldn’t bother him to be with Marc in an open space, in the middle of the street during a rush-hour, but it does bother him and he is relieved. He’s burning and he hasn’t figure out what to do with it yet. He thinks he can let himself to be a little happy about the way it is now, since he’s gone through all day of suffocating for Marc’s sake. No, it sounds bad. It isn’t something Marc’s forced him to do. Sieg chose it. No _charades_ , he chose it. It’s important.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Marc asks turning his face to Sieg. They’re lying on the floor of the roofless tree-house. More stable than the constantly rocking wooden platform and closer to the sky than the trampoline. The sky, Sieg notices with a corner of his eye, now turned to face Marc, too, is turning from the sunset’s blaze to the evening’s scatter of stars. Marc’s face is all blue and green in the muted light filtered through leaves and Sieg can’t quite see the look in his eyes. There’s no frown between his eyebrows and he is raising one corner of his mouth. He simply wants to know, Sieg realizes and it hits him that he wants to know what Marc is thinking about, too.

‘Just stuff,’ Sieg replies and feels sorry for his inability to form pieces of his mind into words . There’s a fear inside him that he’ll never learn it and the weight in his chest will never stop growing. It’ll only get harder and harder, pulling the sounds out of his throat. Sieg is trying again, because it’s Marc and he’s still looking at him. It’s terrifying, this determination of his to get something sincere out of Sieg. The whole world let Sieg be a shell and assumed that was it, but Marc is searching for more and Sieg is surprised himself there’s something to find. All those unsaid words. He hasn’t known about them, before Marc, not so much, at least. He knows now and he tries to pick them and use them right. ‘I’m thinking –‘ Sieg says and breaks. He focuses his eyes on the _Blueberry Intergalactic_. They have forgotten the box once they’ve lifted it all the way up from the ground. Too tired balancing on the trunk to do anything but lie on the floor of the tree-house. ‘Do you do this a lot,’ Sieg says at last. ‘Going up there and, you know,’ he raises his arm. Marc follows the movement of his hand with an  unrealized smile.

‘Stargaze, you mean?’ Sieg nods. Marc knows the words, he thinks, the precise names of all the things. He must speak a lot, with people. He must have learned to call things what they are. It makes Sieg feel little and stupid, but Marc looks so happy the feeling doesn’t last long. ‘I used to,’ Marc says. ‘The name, _Intergalactic Blueberry_ , I invented it. It hit me big, mom and dad even got me a telescope. Neetlje plays with it, sometimes,’ Marc goes on and Sieg is sad and, strangely, wanting to laugh. It doesn’t surprise him a bit that Marc has a telescope. It seems obvious, with his ice cream parlor of a house and a trampoline and all of it. He’s a boy with words and things, and Sieg’s a boy teachers call _troubled_. Sieg feels bitter for a moment and he tries not to feel it. He listens to Marc’s quiet voice. ‘It makes me think, you know, the sky. Like I were looking in the mirror,’ Marc says.

‘Weird,’ Sieg replies lightly. Marc kicks him and it doesn’t hurt anything. ‘I mean,’ Sieg fights with the burning bits of his body, ‘It’s all empty or burning there, right?’ he asks and Marc goes somewhat still and his leg doesn’t move away from Sieg’s. ‘They keep burning and eating stuff around them, the’ Sieg looks for a name. ‘Black holes, them. And each star turns into one, sometime, so,’ Sieg stops and he isn’t sure what he’s speaking about anymore. ‘They’re all possible black holes,’ he finishes. ‘I mean, why would you want to think about it?’ Sieg feels his cheeks burning.

‘You can look at them and see frozen fireworks’ Marc says. ‘It takes some eye-squinting, but it makes it less depressing.’ _Depressing_. The word hits Sieg hard. Is he? He doesn’t know. He stretches his fingers and finds Marc’s and, eyes focused on the sky, he begins tangling them together. It’s to stop himself from seeing the sky on fire and himself up on it. Marc doesn’t move away, but he doesn’t catch Sieg’s hand in a way he would before. Long time before. There’s silence all around them, with only their breaths audible, the parlor and the people all away. It’s Marc who breaks it, his voice changed:

‘It can’t be the same thing all over.’

‘I know.’ Sieg forces his eyes to turn to Marc. ‘It won’t.’ Their faces are very close, but in the dark Sieg can see only the shadows on his cheeks. Marc isn’t smiling.

‘It’s a lot, the thing you’re asking for,’ he says, with an odd carefulness to it. Sieg doesn’t understand the turn Marc’s daring took. It’s as if he weren’t expecting Sieg to follow and his confidence had yet to catch up with him. Sieg feels bad when he thinks he has made Marc so. ‘You sure about it?’

Sieg hates himself for the moment of hesitance.

‘Yeah,’ he says and tries to smile. Marc smiles back.

‘Alright.’ The whites of his teeth flash in a grin. Sieg feels the hold on his hand tightening, fingers hard on his wrist. They lie up there, stiffening and getting colder, hands clasped and eyes unmoved. Locked in their gaze are things larger than whole of the night sky, be it crystal clear or not.

*

There’s a storm late in the night and it’s an August storm sounding as if the sky was being broken in the half and put anew. The rain is beating against the window furiously and Sieg can’t sleep. His eyes are open wide and he sees the shadows of water coursing on the glass coursing on the floor. They look like snakes and when he gets up, he’s careful not to step on one. He is feeling empty, all hollowed out. A creature of momentary courage, alive in bursts and deserted during the intervals, he is. His hands are sweating and his body feels all hot and itching and aching. His pajamas are glued to his skin. The door moans when he opens it and so does the floor when he makes his way through the dark corridor, full of sounds of storm and Eddy’s video game. It must be past midnight, Sieg thinks as he knock on the door.

‘What,’ Eddy barks from behind and Sieg goes in. He sits on the edge of Eddy’s bed. Eddy is sprawling all over it, legs longs and elbows wide, head resting on the wall. His cheeks are bright red and there’s a glimmer in his eyes. Sieg hasn’t heard him argue with Dad, so it can’t be booze. It hits Sieg: Eddy is trying. For now, at least. He hasn’t found a job yet, but he spends all days looking for it. He says he’s looking for it. Maybe he doesn’t lie. Sieg wonders if it’s all because the heatwave and The Sieg Problem and the way his body must have looked, all still in the hospital bedclothes. It was Eddy whom Dad took to the hospital, when mom – no, Sieg can’t think it.

‘Can’t sleep,’ Sieg says and crushes Eddy’s foot as he’s settling on the bed. Eddy kicks him, lightly. It’s not always so. A component of The Ed Problem is violence. He is what people call _violent_. Sieg hasn’t cared all that much. It only meant rare punches and pushes, none of which left bruises. Now he wonders if it’s what happens with unsaid words. If you don’t practice pronouncing them, they stay in your body and after some time, they turn into clenched fists. Sieg feels this is what happened when he and Marc found themselves on the road in front of the Eddy’s car. Sieg didn’t know what to do and he didn’t know what to say and it all turned into _violence_. It wasn’t that he wanted to hurt Marc. He doesn’t remember thinking anything at that moment. It’s as if human mind subjected to excessive sensations and contradictory rules shut itself down and let the blood turn over, drumming in the ears and beating against the skin. If Eddy didn’t shout from his car and Sieg didn’t stop to imagine Eddy coming out of it and coming up to Marc and landing a real punch and Marc falling down and Sieg unable to do anything – if Sieg hasn’t imagined all this, they would carry on and beat the breaths out of each other. At the moment, it seemed a better option. At the moment, Sieg gave in the stupid and terrifying belief that making each other bleed is a way to bring you closer, somehow. It could be so because of him and Eddy. Eddy hurt Sieg and Sieg felt responsible for it.

It was Eddy whom Dad took to the hospital and Eddy was only twelve. Sieg didn’t know until late afternoon, because he and twenty other eight years olds were on the school trip in the museum down in the town center. There were paintings there. He remembers the blur of the colors and being bored and the strange name: _still life_. He didn’t understand how life could be still. It made him giggle. It turned out he was a _half-orphan_ then and Eddy was another and Dad was a _widower_. They both had changed faces when Sieg saw them. They were haunted by the body in the hospital bedclothes. It made them angry with each other and closer than Sieg has later been to either one of them. It is the way it is, their family.

‘Want to play?’ Eddy asks.

‘Yeah.’

Eddy gives him a console and the TV screen divides into two. The game is one of the older ones which means Eddy isn’t in the worst mood. He hates the older things when he’s in the worst mood, because they make him remember. To have chosen this one, Eddy has to be more or less at peace with his unsaid words. They must have agreed for a truce, Eddy and them.

‘You said I could borrow the moped,’ Sieg says and pushes the buttons wildly. Eddy isn’t the one to like winning easily. It maddens him to see Sieg give up the game just like that. Eddy needs a fight, something long and brutal and real. It’s the sort of the rules he has. Sieg sometimes wonders if Eddy used to run the way he plays. But it was before the hauntings, so maybe it was all different with Eddy, then. The problem is, Sieg can’t really remember. Anything. Eddy used to be furious about it. He would say, _hey, remember the time we all went to the swimming pool and mom’s forgotten her swimsuit and she went there in her clothes and all the old ladies, why the fuck where there old ladies in the swimming pool, anyway?, so mum, she was in the clothes and all the old ladies looked at her and she laughed, do you remember that?_ , and Sieg would say, _no, not really_ , and Eddy was mad. So Sieg learned saying _sure I do_. He went as far as repeating Eddy’s own stories to him until Eddy said _what does it fucking matter now, it’s all just a fucking story_ and it was true, so Sieg didn’t reply and that’s how they finished going over the stories about their mom. Dad has the habit, but it’s rare.

‘The moped?’ Eddy repeats and something blows up on the screen. ‘Yeah, go for it bro.’ Sieg’s character kills something. It screeches awfully. He has no idea how Dad sleeps through it. It must be some strong pills he takes. Pills for dreamless sleeping. There used to be days Sieg wanted to borrow some. ‘What for?’ Eddy asks and Sieg find himself cornered. It’s a basement and they both reached it, Sieg and Eddy. They pull out the guns and begin massacring each other. Sieg winces. It’s almost funny in the poor visuals of this game. He can count the pixels of his blood.

‘I’m taking someone,’ Sieg says. His throat is tight with fear, but the heaviness in his chest isn’t as large as it used to be. There’s something bubbling inside. Because this time, he really is. Not like on The Evening, when he took it with some mad hoping they, he and Marc, would both ride just this night and it all be over and behind them. He considered running away with him, during one second of the ride to the parlor. They could go away to the sea and sell the moped and live in the tent and sell shells to the tourists. Sieg didn’t really want to leave, though and he considered it only because it seemed easier, being with Marc somewhere away from the town and its rules. But now, they’re in the town and they’re with each other. _With_ , Sieg repeats. _Withwithwith_. The bubbling feeling grows.

‘Jessica?’ Eddy asks and Sieg’s character loses the half of his face. It’s ugly. Sieg shifts on the bed and feels the console slipping away from his sweating hands. He swallows, hard.

‘No,’ he says. ‘We – broke up,’ he goes on and Eddy whistles. The light from the TV screen is all over his face and makes it look hellish. It’s now twisted in the weird mix of sympathy and mockery.

‘Bitch,’ he says and the gunfire increases. Sieg’s character is hiding behind the pillar which Eddy is systematically ruining. Sieg doesn’t say anything for a while, but he feels he should. The image of Jessica with blue highlights reappears before his eyes. She looked all sad and lost and like Sieg. She is, Sieg tries to picture it, only a person and she is nice and not guilty at all of the mess Sieg made. If she only didn’t want to go for a spin that much – and if she only didn’t kiss him at the funfair – but it doesn’t make her a _bitch_. When Eddy calls her this, Sieg thinks he’s the one. He did all the things girls Eddy calls _bitches_ do: the lying and the cheating on and the dumping. The thought gives him a sour taste in his mouth.

‘I did it,’ that’s the least Sieg can spit out. Eddy hums. ‘I’m taking a friend on the moped,’ Sieg adds and leaves the pillar’s shadow. Eddy’s going to blow him out in a second. Better to get over with, Sieg thinks, because his eyes are all tired of the blazing colors on the screen, anyway. ‘Marc,’ Sieg says. It sounds final. He has done it, he thinks, and it was something sincere and brave. He has repeated the right choice. It’s all easier in the night and with Eddy happy the way he is with his older games.

‘Two guys on the moped?’ Eddy asks. Sieg doesn’t like the sound of it and the snicker which follows. ‘Queer,’ Eddy says. He does blow up Sieg’s character. It doesn’t make him smile, because he was expecting it, anyway. Even if Sieg tries to be a match for him, he isn’t. Eddy has much more practice at it, after all. Sieg isn’t sure whether he should reply to it. It’s true, what Eddy said.

‘Shut up,’ Sieg decides eventually. It’s careful: not denying it, but not letting Eddy to take over. Eddy shrugs and throws the console away. He kicks Sieg out of his bed and they chuckle about it. ‘So, the moped, can I take it?,’ Sieg asks at the doorstep.

Eddy closes his eyes and Sieg doesn’t know what it means.

‘Yeah, whatever.’

*

The day rises perfect and August to the point. Sieg sees it wide awake. He hasn’t slept much and spent the whole night rolling all over his bed looking for the shift in which he would be comfortable long enough for him to fall asleep. He did, few times. Waiting in between, he saw the shadows pale and sky behind the curtains brighten. When it turns white-gray, the streets lamps go out with their orange-yellow neon-like light. The wind blows between the trees and rustles the leaves. The birds are awakening. People who go to the work in the city an hour from the town drive in their cars, speeding up on the empty streets, wanting to avoid the traffic. Sieg passes them when he goes to the training: smart people with dark glasses, suit-wearing, with coffee in one hand, mobile pressed to ear, driving the car with the sheer will-power, it would seem. Working in the city is the ideal future for the town kids like he is. Some people in his school, they kill themselves over tests and grades, because they want to study in Amsterdam or such, and then work in the city and have a shining car and go for holiday to Japan.

Sieg doesn’t know what his future is going to be. He doesn’t think about it much. The moments like this, him awake and unmoving yet, are rare. There’s so much going on with Dad and Eddy and running and, recently, Marc, that Sieg simply doesn’t have time for thinking about it. The future. His eyes move to the ceiling. He wonders what Marc is going to do. There’s a year of difference between them and it makes Marc closer to the future, whatever it may be. He doesn’t seem the type to go to the city. Maybe he’s going to run professionally. Or maybe he’s going to run the parlor. Or maybe he’s going to be an astronaut and go on the moon and send Sieg postcards from up there. He’d find something stupid to do there, Sieg’s sure of it. Jump in the craters or meet the Martians, the moon-Martians, who take care of cosmic sheep and plant intergalactic blueberries.

So, maybe Sieg is a little bit sleepy.

The next time he opens his eyes, it’s late morning and sun is high in the sky. It’s all very bright and clear, the sort of weather you wish for on your birthday party. It usually rains on Sieg’s, but he tries not to care. The daze of sleepiness is completely off now and he can’t stop pacing around his room once he’s up. He doesn’t know what to do and whether it’s too early and if it’s going to be weird, when. Taking shower seems like a thing to do. It takes him long. He isn’t hungry, but he forces a bowl of cereals into his mouth. Dad eyes him from above his newspaper. From his looks, he seems to be considering asking Sieg if he’s taken something. If, were his Dad familiar with the phrase, he’s _high_. Sieg supposes he is. High, high, high.

‘You fine, kid?’ Dad asks. Sieg doesn’t hear him at first and when he does, he laughs. It makes his dad raise his eyebrows and reevaluate the scale of The Sieg Problem. It doesn’t occur to him Sieg can be euphoric about something. Sieg is. Euphoria, strange thing. He hasn’t felt it since the before swimming-to-never-be. It makes the fire in his body turn. As if you turned self-eating star into a firework, that’s the feeling.

‘I’m just –‘ Sieg starts and stops. There are no words for that, either. It’s too large for words. Sieg makes an uneven circle with his hand. ‘It’s a nice day,’ he says. His dad nods slowly.

‘Some plans, have you?’ he asks and Sieg stops with the spoonful of cereal mid-way between the bowl and his mouth. He needs the permission to go out. He has forgotten. And Dad wasn’t all this happy when Sieg returned long after the curfew the previous night. It just hasn’t seemed to matter. Not when Sieg was back from Marc’s and he and Marc were – they were.

‘I’d like to go out with a friend,’ Sieg says carefully, watching out for the change in Dad’s expression. ‘If I may,’ he adds, all polite and quiet. He has the advantage of being The Better Son in comparison to Eddy for so long his Dad still sees him as such when it really matters. Suspicion or not, it’s an habit of Dad’s to let Sieg have his way. And he’s proud of Sieg’s victory at the race and he’s worried about the Heatwave Incident.

‘Well,’ his Dad says when he’s got over all that, ‘and where are you going?’

‘I was thinking cinema,’ Sieg says and his dad gives a little gasp of surprise. Sieg’s been expecting it. Going to the cinema is similar to getting ice cream, only more so. It’s one of the few places you go on a date to in the town. Nobody cares about the movies, coming here months late, long after everybody interested has seen them on the Internet. It’s all about the building, a relic it is, whose unseen anywhere else frilly architecture and otherworldly by-gone-era aura makes you feel safe with your secrets. Unlike all concrete and glass and steel store, the cinema has dark corners and old scents. There are mirrors which make no sense and peeling off golden paint and frayed and uncomfortable plush seats. You can take pop-corn and coke or lemon tart and rose tea. Stef told Sieg all about it. He called it an antique shop crossed with attic your grandmother lives in. It’s a place where teenagers have been coming to kiss for a century or something crazy like that.

‘Cinema,’ his Dad repeats and it’s heavy with knowledge of all that. ‘Well, be back at sensible hour.’ He says it like this, Sensible Hour, a very precise border, crossing of which has implications as grave as crossing one between two countries at war. Sieg nods and drinks the rest of his cereal straight out of the bowl. Then he takes another shower, just to make sure he smells alright and then he spends few minutes looking into his mirror, wondering how he became a boy who worries about his smell. He isn’t sure whether it’s stupid or mature. Eddy would laugh at it, no matter which one it would be. With his hair still wet, Sieg jumps on the moped and kicks it start and rides.

It really is a perfect day. Sieg rides through the town and sees people strolling, families with children and old couples holding onto each other and girls holding hands and boys pushing and kicking. It’s as if, after the heatwave and the storms, summer has reached the balance. It turned and turned until it shifted just to the right shape. The air Sieg swallows in the moped rush tastes sweet, like rain raising up from the asphalt and fruits weighting in the orchards. There are people in their lawns, at porches and windows, watching the August noon ripen, unmoving not because they’re sleepy, but because they’re content sitting where they sit and seeing what they see. If the summer was to last one day, it would be this August day.

The parlor is almost crowded when Sieg comes here and it takes him a while of knocking chairs and murmuring apologies to get to the counter. Marc is right behind it. He laughs seeing Sieg fail to make his way around the group of loud German tourists who seem to be commanding the room. Then, at last, Sieg is here.

‘Do you have a moment?’ he asks.

‘Define moment.’

‘Few hours.’

Marc laughs.

‘Alright,’ he says. ‘Alright.’ His eyes are wide and bright. They can’t stop smiling. ‘I’m going to get someone come and fill in.’ He shots Sieg a look from under his eyelashes. ‘Wait for me, yeah?’ he murmurs. Sieg fights the urge to jump over the counter and – do something.

‘Not going anywhere,’ he says and Marc nods. Sieg feels a burning hot splinter puncture the bubble in his chest. It’s because there still need to be assurances. No running away, Sieg could say, not this time, anyway. The sensation goes away when Marc returns with his father. Sieg goes through another session of _where to_ s and _oh_ s, conducted in an entirely different matter. It’s less than inquiry and more than courtesy. If Sieg had to name it, he’d say it was _interest_ , however crazy it sounds. The talk is over soon and after fighting their way through the yard full of tables and chairs and strollers, Sieg and Marc are out.

‘Yours?’ Marc asks pointing the moped. Sieg doesn’t answer, only hops on it with, he hopes, swiftness of an experienced driver. It seems more impressive this way. Marc whistles and settles behind him, arms tight around Sieg. Sieg’s heart does strange things inside his chest. He isn’t quite sure he’ll be able to ride like this. He hasn’t even started and he is dizzy already. Is it normal, he wonders, to feel so much because of one person? ‘Can you even ride it?’ Marc’s breath blows around Sieg’s neck.

‘I tried,’ Sieg replies, almost high-pitched, and the moped bolts forward with force completely out of Sieg’s control. Marc bursts out laughing and Sieg can’t help giving in. The sounds get lost in the wind, but Sieg feels it in their bodies, shaking against each other. The road moves quickly under the moped’s heels.

‘It’s great!’ Marc screams and Sieg feels like exploding with laughter. Marc’s arms, impossibly, tighten more around him. It’s good, the best, them somewhere out of the world, together in the rush, no space between their bodies. Sieg closes his eyes.

It’s a miracle they don’t crash before reaching the cinema. There’re many people in the center. Many houses stand empty on such honey-golden afternoon and anyone who leaves, sooner or later comes here. Here are the town’s only cinema and museum and department store with a bowling club in the basement. There’re old postcard-like looking houses which the tourists take photos of and a fountain with a statue of a naked beauty pouring the water out of a vase. A group of boys younger than Sieg stands around, snickering and fascinated. Girls fill little cafes, drinking coffees whose names Sieg can’t pronounce. In front of the town’s public library are installed tired-looking students, casting envious glances from above piles of their books. All around the plaza children chase seagulls and pigeons. Smarter ones lure them with crumbs of their cakes, ordered for them by now amused parents in a confectionery on the corner. Sieg is terrifyingly conscious of the way his and Marc’s bodies are touching each other, them sitting in one saddle. His throat runs dry.

‘Last stop,’ he says and Marc gets up, slowly, fingers lingering on Sieg’s arm. Somebody must have seen and must have whispered it in the ear of their neighbor and the neighbor must have – must have – Sieg exhales loudly and forces himself to get up from the moped, block it and walk with Marc towards the cinema. Their hands brush, but Sieg is careful for it not to last for longer. Marc looks at him.

‘I thought,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ Sieg replies. The sunlight is falling straight into his eyes. ‘I’m only –‘ They’re in the shadow of the cinema and Sieg can stop blinking. ‘I can’t.’ Marc face turns stony. ‘I’m sorry,’ Sieg says and it’s too late to add anything else, because they’re in the front of the ticket-seller. They get the tickets for the next movie starting and both pay for their own only. They find the room and the seats in silence. Sieg, who looked forwards to seeing the mysterious cinema with its quirks and secrets, is now annoyed with its decorative pretense. He regrets he hasn’t just brought Marc to the river. No people at the river. No reasons for anger. He tries to find a comfortable position in his stinking arm-chair. He can’t. Marc, sitting to his right, has his eyes fixed on the yet-blank screen. There aren’t many people besides them in the hall. Almost all of them, as Stef has said, are couples. Some wait for the lights to go out before tangling themselves into large and pulsing human knots. Some don’t. Sieg looks at Marc. They should have gone to the river. But Sieg felt he should have done something different this time, since they were – well. He thought it’d fit to go into such place, a dating place. He thought he’d be capable of handling it.

‘I’m sorry,’ he repeats when the movie finally starts. It makes him miss the title-card, so he isn’t really sure what they’re watching. There are exploding cars and shouting people, so there seems to be a chance for some privacy. Marc sighs.

‘I don’t understand it,’ he says in between two bangs. Movie-light makes shadows on his face grow long and shivering. Sieg wants to touch him, badly. Here’s another secret: Sieg doesn’t understand it neither. There’s fire in his throat.

‘I don’t – really – neither.’ The words come out slow and rough. On the screen, a giant black coach lifts its walls to reveal giant black barrels. Sieg isn’t sure how it’s supposed to work or what the plot is. The barrels make people scream in anger. The subtitles blink too fast for him to focus and read them. Marc keeps quiet.

‘It’s difficult,’ he says, eventually. ‘So difficult, not to –‘ It’s the first time Sieg sees him at loss with his words. ‘I want to –‘, Marc stops again, voice uneven, ‘All the time, you know, and I can’t understand why people seeing it, why does it even matter, it’s ridiculous.’ Sieg sinks in his uncomfortable armchair. _Ridiculous_. There’s a word for you. He certainly feels so, now. He doesn’t know what to do. His mind keeps twisting and his body keeps burning.

He has no use of words, so he reaches over the handrail and grabs Marc’s hand, crushing his fingers. Reluctantly, Marc lets it. After a few more explosions and bangs and shouts, Sieg leans over and touches Marc’s cheek. He traces shadows running all over it. Marc closes his eyes. The movie goes on, loud. Sieg bends forward and shutting his mind down, word _ridiculous_ ringing like a bell trapped in his skull, kisses Marc. They can barely touch lips, sitting the way they are. Marc shifts. He grabs Sieg’s t-shirt and brings them closer. The cars crash against each other. Somebody’s bones break. The gunfire doesn’t stop. Sieg and Marc break apart. Their breaths are loud.

‘How do you like the movie?’ Sieg asks.

‘It’s horrible,’ Marc says and they get up and get through the empty rows to the exit. Nobody complains. In the corridor, they look at each other, red-cheeked and out of air, and look around. They break into the run, as far from the entrance as possible. It’s like running through an abandoned museum. In echo of their steps, they reach an empty staircase seeming to lead nowhere. There’s dust everywhere, even on the faded tapestry covering the walls. It’s going to be all over the t-shirt, Sieg thinks, his back pressed to it, but it doesn’t bother him, because the next second Marc kisses him again.

*

When they go out of the cinema building, an August night is awaiting them. There’re more people than they were, carrying around lights of mobile screens and cameras and cigarettes. The old street-lamps cast their dim orange light. If you squint, you can see the moths beating against the bulbs. Sieg and Marc go through the smiling crowd, smelling drinks and sweets, and get on the moped. It starts with a roar and there are few gasps of surprise. A little girl points them to her parents, all of them red with fresh tan. Must be from somewhere cold, skin delicate like this. First touch of sunlight and it’s all burning. Just like me, Sieg thinks, rushing through the speed.

He hasn’t let go of Marc’s hand.

‘Straight home?’ he asks through the wind. Marc’s laughter is in his ear.

‘Take us somewhere else,’ he says and Sieg does. He leaves the center and he leaves the town, the old parts and the new parts, his home and Marc’s home, the bar and the riverside, all of it rests behind them. There’s a highway in front of them and it’s all empty. All they see is the horizon. ‘We’re the only people in the world,’ Marc whispers and Sieg feels the smile break his cheeks.

‘Let’s never stop.’

**Author's Note:**

> Here's a full poem I used for the title.
> 
>  
> 
> IS THAT WHAT YOU ARE
> 
> New ghost is that what you are  
> Standing on the stairs of water
> 
> No longer surprised
> 
> Hope and grief are still our wings  
> Why we cannot fly
> 
> What failure still keeps you  
> Among us the unfinished
> 
> The wheels go on praying
> 
> We are not hearing something different  
> We beat our wings  
> Why are you here
> 
> I do not think I had anything else to give
> 
> The wheels say it after me
> 
> There are feathers in the ice  
> We lay the cold across our knees
> 
> Today the sun is farther than we think
> 
> And at the windows in the knives  
> You are watching


End file.
